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Tag: SPC

With the paracetamol I could lie comfortably on my side, so I got to sleep quite quickly. I still got woken several times during the night by very painful erections.

I really didn’t want more of them so at about 04:30 I decided to stay awake until breakfast. Then I dozed off again and wasn’t woken by another erection until just before 07:00.

Before rounds I let the nurses know I’d like to go home on leave. In Swedish hospitals they’ll let you go home before you’re officially discharged on what they call permission. The doctor on rounds agreed that I’d be fine at home. He changed the dressing on my penis; the old one had got pretty grotty by this point.

A bit later the nurses swapped to leg bags for both of the catheters. They had a terrible time removing the original ones I’d got after surgery. Those catheters had a threaded connector rather than the usual push-fit ones and they just wouldn’t come out. One of the nurses ended up using forceps to grip the catheter tubing.

After lunch my husband came to take me home. Having not had a decent night’s sleep for a couple of days I felt like a nap in the afternoon. That was when we discovered that the nurse had cut the leg bag tubes so short that the bags had to lie beside me on the bed. I also noticed that nothing had come out through the suprapubic catheter since the bag change.

I slept for an hour or so and then woke up with a feeling of pressure in my bladder. The urethral bag had filled (to it’s tiny 500 ml capacity) but there was still nothing in the other bag. When I emptied the bag a strong bladder spasm squeezed urine out around the urethral catheter, leaving a lingering burning sensation.

In the evening we took the bus back up to the hospital to have them check the suprapubic catheter. When the nurse tried flushing it out nothing came out of the urethral catheter but I got a feeling of pressure and water leaked out of the suprapubic wound.

Further attempts to squirt saline into and suck saline out of the two catheters didn’t result in much. So I drank some water and waiting to see if the suprapubic catheter had started working again. It hadn’t, so we went home but with some better leg bags this time.

This time I could organise the tubing much more comfortably, with the leg bags hanging off a drawer on my bedside cabinet, and got to sleep quite early.